


Of Angels and Angles

by mermaiddrunk



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - WW1, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-11 01:51:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2048787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mermaiddrunk/pseuds/mermaiddrunk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year is 1915. Everywhere, there is war and Sansa is just another orphaned girl in a white apron with a red cross on her chest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Angels and Angles

Everything ends eventually. Even war.

These are the words Sansa repeats like a prayer each night as she lies in her rickety little cot, listening to the wind as it whistles through the broken teeth of all the shattered windows of Le Donjon Rouge. She doesn’t know why they call it that _,_ since it isn’t really a keep at all, but an abandoned school they've made into a hospital.

She had asked Myrcella when she first arrived. Myrcella was younger than any of them, and only in Arras because her grandfather was some general or something.  There were rumours that her family was German, but she spoke English and French like a natural, so Sansa never knew for sure. She never did any real work like the rest of them either but Sansa thought she at least should know, considering she had been there so long and all, but the angel-haired girl had shrugged her shoulders right up to her ears and said, “It’s always been called that.”

She’s since learnt that there were so many questions without answers she might as well stop asking altogether.

The thing that happens, happens one morning, sometime between changing the bedpans and re-dressing crusty wounds. Sansa marks her day not by hours, but by activities. There’s no point in counting the ticking on a clock when all that matters is that everything that needs to be done gets done. No-one cares that it’s nine at night and you haven’t eaten since that morning and the last time you sat down was hours ago. No-one cares because everyone is busy, everyone is tired, and there are bodies and blood and bombs, and if you think for one second you’re special or above it all, you’re in for a nasty shock.

It had been difficult in the beginning. Sansa who was so accustomed to being good at everything. Sansa who was accustomed to being praised and applauded, who never thought twice about perfection because it came so easily to her. Except in Arras, there was no Governess Mordane to pat her on the head and tell her how fine her line work was while her sister scowled at her from the corner of the room.

She hadn’t planned on being a VAD nurse or spending her eighteenth year sewing together broken soldiers like they were silk and lace.

One stitch, two stitch, bloody stitch, slip knot.

The first time she dressed an oozing stump she thought she would faint like she did when she was eight and watched their father reset Robb’s dislocated arm. Arya had laughed at her then, and called her a baby. Arya who was a scrappy little thing, all bruises and scabs – practically a baby herself.

If only her little sister could see her now, cleaning out bullet holes and wiping down bed sores. She thinks Arya might even have some respect for her, what with how she managed to fool them into believing she was twenty-three (not that they’d looked too hard anyway, since war made liars and grown-ups of them all).

That was months ago and here she is, in Le Donjon Rouge, just another orphan girl in a white apron and a red cross on her chest.

The morning itself is uneventful in that it is exactly like every other morning and it's sometime between the putrid-smelling bedpans and bloody gauze patches that Margaery finds her.

Margaery Tyrell, who wears red lipstick with her uniform and always smells like rose water. Margaery who speaks with a posh London accent and never flinches when the windows shake during the air raids.

She comes up behind Sansa and says in a conspiratorial whisper that makes the words vibrate against her throat and her breath come out warm against Sansa’s ear, “Have you heard about Shae?”

Sansa turns around to see Margaery, all smiles and blossoming cheeks and Sansa wonders how, in the midst of all this darkness, Margaery looks like she’s swallowed the sun and has flowers growing from her hair.

Her mood, as always, is infectious. “No. What about Shae?”

Shae is one of the older girls – French and not a nurse like the rest of them. Margaery calls her “worldly”, but she’s heard some of the others use more distasteful terms. She brings them fruit and news that they can’t get over the wire. Once or twice she’s even brought cigarettes, but Sansa doesn’t smoke. She tried once and it left  her feeling sick for hours after.

Curious to hear about Shae, she allows Margaery to take her hands, which are rough from months of scrubbing and stitching (skin, not floors and fabric).

She pulls Sansa into the garden, which is little more than a cobbled courtyard surrounded by a high wall and some lemon trees. Sometimes, the healthier patients would come out to feel the sunshine, but thereis only one stone bench and it's usually covered with pigeon droppings.

The real garden, the big one that Sansa can see from her window, the one overrun with wild roses and dandelions, is over the wall, which they're all strictly forbidden to cross.

 _High garden_ , Margaery calls it; for she reckoned you’d have to climb a long ways up before you’d ever get over.

“We’ll go there sometime,” Margaery had once said, as they watched a pair of robins make a nest in one of the gnarled trees. “And we’ll live up in the branches, just like the birds.”

“What will we eat?” Sansa asked.

“Berries and flowers.” Margaery sounded so sure, so certain, that Sansa allowed herself to fall under the spell and into this make-believe world.

“What will we wear?”

“We’ll make dresses out of leaves and sew them together with spider webs. And at night, we’ll have balls,” she looked at Sansa then, her eyes shining with a mad sort of intensity. “Oh, we’ll have the most marvellous balls.”

“Who will come?” Sansa thought about invitations and how she wouldn’t know what address to write for all the bodies in the trenches.

“Why, the birds of course. And the squirrels, I imagine there are a few up in those trees.”

“What about wolves?”

Margaery looked surprised then. “Wolves?”

Sansa nodded. She had always liked wolves. Her father used to tell them fantastic stories about the ancient wolf clans of his homeland. She never forgot those stories.

“I suppose there are wolves, far in the north.” Margaery had reached out and tucked some of Sansa’s hair behind her ear before turning her attention back to the window. “We shall invite them all.”

And Sansa had smiled and looked out into the rose garden that was both near and unreachable. “That would be very nice.”

A day after their party planning, Sansa received a letter from their old tutor Master Luwin. It was dated seven months back and the envelope was dirty and black as a raven’s wing. 

He didn’t say the boys were dead, only missing.

She doesn’t tell Margaery that she looks for her brothers’ faces in every wounded soldier. She doesn’t have to. Margaery has brothers in this war too. But unlike Sansa, she isn’t looking for ghosts among the living.

Her father went first. Then Robb. Then Bran and little Rickon (missing, not dead).

And Arya.

Somewhere, she imagined her sister. Her scrappy, stupid, brave sister who had chopped off her hair, pulled up some trousers and followed the butcher’s boy into a war. There was no blackened letter about Arya, so Sansa dared to hope.

And then there was Jon. Jon who she used to love least of all. Now she would give up everything to see him again. Even if he came in broken, like all the boys and men who were wheeled through the doors. She’d fix him, she promises herself. If she ever saw Jon again, she would love him.

But it’s been months and months and no word, no telegram, no anything and the faces of her family have become blurry and obscured, as if she was looking at them through tears or a dirty mirror.

Only her mother she remembers clearly. Those clear blue eyes and hair like early autumn leaves. Her mother who brushed out her tangles and held her close even when she declared to be too old for hugs. She died the day they heard about Robb. They say her heart just broke.

She mourns her family and spends her hours tending to strangers whose names she’ll never know, saving them for their sisters and their mothers. Often they call her by their sweethearts’ names. She’s been Alayne and Birdie and all manner of things and sometimes she forgets she’s Sansa. Until Margaery calls her name, in that specific way that makes her feel like something inside of her has grown wings and is fluttering to come out.

And now, here in the lemon tree courtyard, Margaery says, “Shae’s left.”

“She’s left?” Sansa feels her stomach sink. “Why?”

Margaery pulls her further into the garden, until they’re practically under the trees. “Do you remember last May, when the German soldiers arrived in Calais?”

Sansa nods. Everyone knew about it.

“Well, as it turns out, Shae’s gone and run off with one. Megga overheard one of the cooks talking about it.”

“With a _German_?” Sansa can’t understand why Margaery says it so calmly. Why she isn’t outraged or disgusted. “Why?”

But Margaery only shrugs. “Who knows? Security, money, maybe even love.”

“How could she love one of _them_?” She’s overcome by the most ridiculous urge to cry.

“They might not all be bad, Sansa.” She says it like Sansa’s a child, to be gently schooled and corrected. “They have families and duties and orders too and somewhere, over the border, there’s a group of nurses, just like us, tending to wounded soldiers in German or Prussian or Austrian uniform.”

She gapes at Margaery, unable to understand how she could be defending the very people were going around killing her family. It feels like an odd sort of betrayal. And yet she knows it’s ridiculous. Margaery isn’t defending the Germans. _Is she?_

Margaery had a way of speaking like she knew everything about everything, without sounding like a know-it-all. It was comforting to feel like no matter what awful thing happened, Margaery would know how to handle it, or just what to say. And always, it was said in that sincere, playful way of hers.

Except sometimes, only sometimes, on the rainy nights when the wind rattled the windows and dared anyone to sleep without a shiver, Margaery would whisper, “What if they’re all gone? There’s been no telegram for months now. Not even from Loras.”

They never said dead. They never said killed or slain. They said gone. As if the person just disappeared. As if maybe they were never there to begin with. All those people.

_Gone._

And now Sansa searches for her words as she says, “You’re saying what Shae did is…. You’re saying it’s acceptable?”

Margaery looks at her for a moment, like she knows what she wants to say, but isn’t sure how she wants to say it. “I’m saying that love, if that’s what it turns out to be, well it’s messy, isn’t it? Especially during a war.” She leans against the spiny trunk of a lemon tree and looks up at Sansa, who, though younger, is still a little taller. “You don’t _choose_ who you love.”

For a moment, Sansa thinks of her brother who married pretty Jeyne Westerling a week before he was drafted, despite their mother’s fervent protests. Sansa had thought it romantic at the time. Now she’s not sure what she thinks.

Margaery seems to see the shadows creep over her face and says lightly, in a voice that draws her back to the sunny morning and the citrusy smell of the air. “I'd bet you had a dozen white nights knocking down your door before the world fell to pieces.”

It’s funny how they’ve never talked about this. How they always seemed to talk about everything but this.

 And Sansa shakes her head, looking at the toes of her black shoes. “No.”

“Not even a silly boy?” Margaery teases and her cheeks dimple in a way that makes Sansa smile.

“No, not even that. Not even…”

“What?”

“Not even a kiss.”

There. She’s said it. A year ago, this was her most terrible secret and now, now it seems sort of boring next to everything else.

Margaery pushes herself off the tree trunk and stands up straight. “I find it hard to believe that the prettiest girl in all of England and France has never been kissed.” It’s a ridiculous compliment, and would have sounded silly coming from anyone but Margaery.

“It wasn’t…” Sansa’s shy suddenly and says, “I had offers. I just… well a first kiss is supposed to mean something, isn’t it?”

Margaery nods in agreement, her face becoming unusually sombre and Sansa wonders if she’s remembering her own first kiss and the boy who gave it to her. The thought makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to imagine Margaery kissing boys.

“Yes, it should.”

Sansa continues, babbling as she does when she gets nervous, which she is, for some unfathomable reason. “I always imagined my first kiss would be like magic, that the right kind of kiss could change everything. Silly isn’t it?”

But Margaery, who’s still looking at Sansa with a kind of wonderment, like she’s something out of a dream says, “It’s not silly at all.”

“Sometimes I wonder if-”

“What, Sansa?”

Has Margaery always been this close? Were their eyelashes always almost touching, or-

“Well, I wonder what would happen if-”

And then, just like that, Margaery is kissing her. And not chastely the way the books explained it, but with her mouth moving over Sansa’s all wet and soft like she’s trying to teach her a new language.

For a brief moment, she wonders if this is what Shae had felt with her German or what Robb had felt with his Jeyne and if so, she thinks she understands. She thinks she might just understand.

As it happens, a kiss is not enough to end a war. The bombs go on banging and the boys go on dying. But for a moment that could have been infinite, Sansa forgets. She forgets about her brother, rotting in a shallow trench. She forgets about Arya’s cackling laugh and her mother’s warm, gentle hands. She forgets her father’s stories and even her own name.

There is only Margaery with flowers in her hair.

And that is its own kind of victory.


End file.
